AI coding assistants have become a developer's best friend. But which one is worth your money — or your time with the free options?

GitHub Copilot

The original. Deep VS Code integration, excellent for autocomplete and boilerplate. At $10/month it is the safe choice. New agent features in Copilot Workspace are genuinely impressive.

Cursor

The challenger that is taking the dev world by storm. Cursor is a full VS Code fork with AI baked into every layer. The Composer feature lets you describe multi-file refactors in plain English. At $20/month, it is the power user choice.

Codeium

The free champion. Codeium offers surprisingly strong autocomplete for $0. The context window is smaller than Copilot, but for indie developers and students, it is unbeatable value.

Verdict

Professional devs: Cursor. Teams on budget: Copilot. Solo devs / students: Codeium.